The evisceration of the rule of law at home and abroad solidifies America as a rogue state.

CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 05, 2026

The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.

Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

The corporate-indentured Democratic Party, our purported opposition, blocks the only mechanism that can save us — popular mass movements and strikes — knowing its corrupt and despised party leadership will be swept aside. Democratic Party leaders treat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a flicker of light in the darkness — as if he has leprosy. Better to let the whole ship go down than surrender their status and privilege.

Dictatorships are one-dimensional. They reduce politics to its simplest form: Do what I say or I will destroy you.

Nuance, complexity, compromise, and of course empathy and understanding, are beyond the tiny emotional bandwidth of gangsters, including the Gangster-in-Chief.

Dictatorships are a thug’s paradise. Gangsters, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley or in the White House, cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries.

Dictatorships invert the social order. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, self-sacrifice are negative qualities. Those who embody these qualities are marginalized and persecuted. The heartless, corrupt, mendacious, cruel and mediocre thrive.

Dictatorships empower goons to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobilized. Goons from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Goons from Delta Force, Navy Seals and Black Ops CIA teams, which as any Iraqi or Afghan can tell you are the most lethal death squads on the planet. Goons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — seen escorting a hand-cuffed President Nicolás Maduro in New York — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and police departments.

Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power? Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? Can anyone pretend that with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws — which should help us confront the looming ecocide, the gravest threat to human existence — there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone make the argument that the U.S. is the defender of human rights, democracy, a rule based order and the “virtues” of Western civilization?

Our reigning gangsters will accelerate the decline. They will steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The Trump family has pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. They do so as they mock the rule of law and tighten their vice-like grip. The walls are closing in. Free speech is abolished on college campuses and the airwaves. Those who decry the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are slandered and censored. ICE, powered by Palantir — with a budget of $170 billion over four years — is laying the foundations for a police state. It has expanded the number of its agents by 120 percent. It is building a nationwide complex of detention centers. Not solely for the undocumented. But for us. Those outside the gates of the empire will fare no better with a $1 trillion budget for the war machine.

And this brings me to Venezuela where a head of state and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped and spirited to New York in open violation of international law and the U.N. Charter.

We have not declared war on Venezuela, but then there was no declared war when we bombed Iran and Yemen. Congress did not approve the kidnapping and bombing of military facilities in Caracas because Congress was not informed.

The Trump administration dressed up the crime — which took the lives of 80 people — as a drug raid and, most bizarrely, as a violation of U.S. firearms statutes: “possession of machine guns and destructive devices; and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”

These charges are as absurd as attempting to legitimize the genocide in Gaza as Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

If this was about drugs, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández would not have been pardoned by Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S., a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.

But drugs are the pretext.

Flush with success, there is already talk by Trump and his officials about Iran, Cuba, Greenland and perhaps Colombia, Mexico and Canada.

Absolute power at home and absolute power abroad expands. It feeds off of each lawless act. It snowballs into totalitarianism and disastrous military adventurism. By the time people realize what has happened, it is too late.

Who will rule Venezuela? Who will rule Gaza? Does it matter?

If nations and people do not bow before the great Moloch in Washington, they are bombed. This is not about establishing legitimate rule. It is not about fair elections. It is about using the threat of death and destruction to procure total subservience.

Trump made this clear when he warned interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro”.

Maduro’s kidnapping was not carried out because of drug trafficking or possession of machine guns. This is about oil. It is, as Trump said, so the U.S. can “run” Venezuela.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.

Iraqis, a million of whom were killed during the U.S. war and occupation, know what comes next. The infrastructure, modern and efficient under Saddam Hussein — I reported from Iraq under Hussein so can attest to this truth — was destroyed. The Iraqi puppets installed by the U.S. had no interest in governance and reportedly stole some $150 billion in oil revenues.

The U.S., in the end, was booted out of Iraq, although controls Iraqi oil revenues which are funnelled to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The government in Baghdad is allied with Iran. Its military includes Iran-backed militias in Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, the UAE, India and Turkey.

The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the American public anywhere from $4 to $6 trillion, were the most expensive in U.S. history. None of the architects of these fiascos have been held to account.

Countries singled out for “regime change” implode, as in Haiti, where the U.S., Canada and France overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004. The overthrow ushered in societal and government collapse, gang warfare and exacerbated poverty. The same happened in Honduras when a 2009 U.S-backed coup removed Manuel Zelaya. The recently pardoned Hernández became president in 2014 and transformed Honduras into a narco-state, as did U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, who oversaw the production of 90 percent of the world’s heroin. And then there is Libya, another country with vast oil reserves. When Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO during the Obama administration in 2011, Libya splintered into enclaves led by rival warlords and militias.

The list of disastrous attempts by the U.S. at “regime change” is exhaustive, including in Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. All are examples of the folly of imperial overreach. All predict where we are headed.

The U.S. has targeted Venezuela since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez. It was behind a failed coup in 2002. It imposed punishing sanctions over two decades. It tried to anoint opposition politician Juan Guaidó, as “interim president” although he was never elected to the presidency. When this did not work, Guaidó was dumped as callously as Trump abandoned opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. In 2020, we staged a Keystone Cops attempt by ill-trained mercenaries to trigger a popular uprising. None of it worked.

The kidnapping of Maduro begins another debacle. Trump and his minions are no more competent, and probably less so than officials from previous administrations, who tried to bend the world to their will.

Our decaying empire stumbles forward like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, crippled by arrogance and incompetence, torching the rule of law and fantasizing that indiscriminate industrial violence will regain a lost hegemony. Able to project devastating military force, its initial success leads inevitably to self-defeating and costly quagmires.

The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

Shared via Creative Commons.